A target coverage mechanism for adjustable sensing radius sensors in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), target coverage is critical to monitoring performance and network lifetime. However, most existing studies assume battery-powered sensors with fixed sensing radii, which limits coverage efficiency. This paper proposes a target coverage mechanism using solar-powered sensors with adjustable sensing radii, aiming to maximize monitoring quality while balancing energy harvesting and consumption to achieve network sustainability. Bayesian optimization is employed for hyperparameter tuning to predict the required solar energy data. During the scheduling phase, each sensor’s monitoring contribution is evaluated, and the sensor with the highest contribution to bottleneck points of interest (POIs) is scheduled. Furthermore, by reallocating certain sensing radii from the spatial to the temporal dimension, the monitoring quality of POIs can be further improved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms existing approaches in terms of both worst-case and overall monitoring quality.